F&G Annuities & Life, Inc. (FG) September 2026 Conference Transcript

All right. We'll go ahead and get started here. So I've got F&G annuities for you all. And first I'd like to thank Connor Murphy, CEO and President, Mike Bailey, CFO, and Lina.

Punjabi.

Punjabi. Punjabi. My apologies. CIO. So we've got the whole crew here. Should be a good session. I wanted to kick it off with more of a broad question about the strategy. So starting off with the big picture, you've laid out intentions to align the business model to be less capital-intensive and more fee-based over time. Can you frame where you are in that transition today and some of the things that you're leaning into to further the shift?

Yeah, absolutely. And first of all, just thank you for having us. Thank you for the support. Yeah, so while F&G has been around for a long time, F&G has been around since the 1950s. In many respects, the F&G that exists today had about an eight- or nine-year journey. In that time, we've grown very significantly from being predominantly a fixed-indexed annuity distributed through independent distribution to being much more multifaceted across life and annuities. But I would argue that we were, yeah, we were largely a spread business. We hadn't evolved to where we were doing segment reporting, but this year-end, we did at least take a step in that direction by highlighting that, for example, back in 2022, we were virtually all spread. By 2025, 15% of our earnings had come from fee businesses on the life side, on the reinsurance side, and on our own distribution ownership business. And that just by virtue of the three-year plan, 2025 by 2028, We expect it to be at 25%, which I think is very achievable. Obviously, a lot of levers where you can make that number bigger or smaller as you see fit. So at the same time, it's been a pretty fast-growing. Over the last handful of years, we've gone from about $25 billion of gross AUM to $75 billion, about 55 of that retained. So, yeah, so it's been fast growth. It's been an AUM focus with an ROA expansion story that we largely achieved and an R&E story that's continuing to evolve. Got it. Okay, very helpful.

Next one on competition, can you talk about the competitive environment a bit and specifically for some of the spread products? How do you balance the discipline versus profitable growth? And what are the things we should be focused on?

At the moment, by product to some extent, by distribution opportunity as well. So just maybe running through them, the FIA space, I would argue, remains very healthy. We had a particularly strong first half of the year. We were up about 4%. I think the industry was down 5%. But I would say that, broadly speaking, it's an area of the market that has done well pretty consistently. And perhaps in any individual quarter, you might see a bit of a change in league tables about how somebody, or even over the course of the year, how it may have moved around. But we just had this conversation with the board, actually, and we were looking back over five years. 70% of the business is written by 10 companies, and it's basically everybody's – it all shakes out. Everybody's basically done the same over the last five years. I would say everybody's up 15% to 20%. But it's a little tight. I would say that 2025 was a little less profitable than 2024. I would say 26 so far has been somewhere in the middle. Um, switching over to RILAs, we were newer to the Buffered annuity space. Um, for us, it's been a great growth, but off a small base. So we're, we're very, very happy with everything in that space right now. In fact, we've written as much RILA already this year that we wrote all of last year. So that's, um, but off a, admittedly off a smaller base. So that's been pretty good. Um, switching over, well, maybe staying within on the MIGA space, we have de-emphasized that pretty significantly for us. And that's just been a capital allocation return trade for us. It ebbs and flows the second quarter of last year. We wrote a lot because it was a great spread opportunity and a great reinsurance opportunity. We reinsured 90% of our MIGAs. But at the moment, we're seeing better opportunities elsewhere. And in fact, as you know, we did probably an outsized level of buybacks for our company in the second quarter. and it was capital that we didn't use on MIGAs that we used on the buybacks. So we see the MIGA spaces remaining very competitive. So we're just not seeing the returns there to ride very much of it at the moment. We're still riding some. We're still in the space, and we'll move that. We'll ratchet that up and down as the opportunities arise. On the live side, still seeing a lot of attractiveness with the IUL space. Again, a lot of how we distribute through the independent distribution organizations, we're really focused on middle America and multicultural America. So that's been strong. We're the number six. So we're number six in FIA, number six in IUL, but that's on premium dollars. We're actually number three on policies. We're selling on average smaller face-to-face policies, probably a little under $250,000. So that's maybe $1,200 to $1,500 a year in annual premium. we're seeing smaller dollars from a premium point of view. So Middle America is less able to afford a policy in 2026 than they could in 2025. So that's interesting. So similar policy, but dollars are down a little bit. On the pension side, the PRT space is interesting. You tend to see less in the first half of the year. You see more in the third quarter, more again in the fourth. And we wrote $500 million or $600 million in the first half of the year, which was probably about what we thought we would do. I'd say we kind of got our fair share. We ended up riding about one in every four or five of the opportunities we bid on. But that was pretty modest, maybe from an overall industry. I think we see some of the bigger carriers coming down the market a little bit. We don't participate in the above billion-dollar space. We're more in the $100 million, the $600 million, $700 million. So certainly some of that competitiveness, I would say we've seen some of the big mutuals come back to that space that we haven't seen for a while. Good space, but, yeah, definitely increased competition there. We'll see how the second half of the year plays out. These pension plans are much more well-funded than they have been previously as well, so it mightn't be quite as robust as it's been in the last couple of years. And it's core for us, but we're not trying to grow that the way that we are. On life and FIA, we'd like to write at least as much as we did in the equivalent quarter of the prior year. On PRT, we're trying to write roughly the same, call it a billion, billion and a half a year, given the size of our balance sheet. And then the last piece, just FABN type stuff, that was very good late last year and the beginning of 26, just private credit concerns and other things have gapped that out. So we've stayed on the sidelines there a little bit. Makes sense.

Next topic, you know, we've seen a couple of your larger competitors that have merged, you know, your prior firm even. And so, you know, wanted to ask about that and just, you know, how important is operational scale in this industry? Do you all feel like you're, you know, positioned well to compete just with the backdrop of some of the, you know, peers becoming, you know, much more consolidated?

All right, maybe I'll go first, but then we'll bring Mike in here as well. It's very important, but I think it's not just about scale. So we are very much in a relationship business, and for us, too, because so much of our business is in the independent distribution space, those are not contractual relationships. They might have been decades ago, but they're really an earned relationship that how well you show up for both of your clients, both the advisory client and the consumer client, is really, really important. You clearly, from a pure operational service perspective, we're very focused on that. But also, remember, when the FIA and IUL space, those are policies that get repriced every year. So we talk about being in the spread margin, but you've heard me say those people are really in the spread maintenance business. And that's a bouncing act. You've got to do the right thing in terms of the company, the advisor, and the shareholder. So I think we show up very well there, and we focus very hard on that. Lots of these companies have a choice. They all have a choice who they do business with. Everybody does business with multiple carriers. I don't think anybody has a monopoly, but we have to manage that pretty carefully. At the same time, we've grown very quickly, so we did look to improve our expense ratio perspective. So we've gone from 60 basis points at the beginning of 25. We have a target of getting down to 45 basis points as an expense ratio by the end of next year. We went 60 to 50 last year. We were at 47 in the middle of the year. So I would say that's a head of plan. It won't necessarily keep going quite so consistently, but we will get there. And I think that's helpful from all sorts of reasons, including the ROA, say. So I think for us, it's about doing your business very well, spending your dollars well, because the competitiveness, don't get me wrong, the competitiveness is tough. And you have to have that lever as well. It would be hard without it. So you're balancing the, call it the investing opportunity with the expense part of it. And then just being able to maintain that core spread, I think, is really important. But broadly, in the industry, obviously, we've got something very big happening with Aqualoo and Corbidge, but maybe not a lot outside of that.

I'll just add, I mean, I think I'll echo some of Connor's comments. I think that, you know, it's a competitive space, and so efficiency is critically important. Some, my former employer included, you know, they're, and I say this fully respectfully, of both sides. And they've decided to look for those efficiencies in the form of scale in terms of an acquisition. And I'm sure they will deliver on that. For us, we're a smaller and more nimble organization. And as such, we have the ability to execute on efficiency initiatives and automation initiatives at a rapid pace and in an efficient manner. So I think that those are just kind of given the position of two Corbridge Equitable, you know, those larger firms. They took a particular approach. We took a particular approach that we take a particular approach, which we felt confident in. I guess it's a different way of saying there are different ways to achieve that operating efficiency.

And I think just to underscore one thing that Mike said, we are a great-sized company, right? So we're big enough to matter. We're, as I mentioned, top six in FIA, IUL, PRT. I think we're the only top 10 FIA rider that doesn't own or isn't owned by an asset manager. We sort of joke and turn it, we're all refugees from bigger companies. So it feels great because we can be very reactive. It's not cumbersome for us to move quickly in the marketplace. And I think that's important as well. Everything happens so quickly in terms of just, I mean, half the annuity products sold out there are replacement products too. So you've got to be in lockstep with everybody else. Having said that, if you go out and do something incredibly unique, it gets copied very, very quickly. So good bouncing.

Next topic was on the ROA. You know, if I rewind back to the investor day you guys did some time ago, you know, there's a medium-term range that was put out. I think it was 133 to 155, if I'm not mistaken. Can you talk a bit about, you know, how you're tracking? I think you made some comments earlier on this as well, but, you know, what are the different things that are sort of moving the ROA around? How do you think it's tracking relative to that? Do you have any kind of update to that range?

So I'll teetling up here a little bit. Going back to that was from our investor metrics a few years ago and ROA expansion that was partly coming from the investment side, partly coming from the scale side. We've talked a little bit about ROA, ROE, AUM, I think were the key metrics from that time. I would argue AUM maintains a very key metric, both gross and net. We talk about it being a little more corridor. We're probably closer to that 120 range at the moment. I think we're going to be 119 over the last trailing 12 months. sure um one of the elements that had contributed on the positive side that may not necessarily stay that high is just the level of surrenders in the industry which is an important one to call out because we're agnostic about surrenders we're just as happy to keep the business on the books we wrote again back to being able to maintain the spread and if it if it as as happens if the business is surrendered we can take that capital and reinvest it on a on a very similar basis but So it's hard to imagine the level of surrenders, and therefore the level of surrender fee income will stay this hard for very long. It may for several quarters. I'm not sure it will for several years, but we'll see. Obviously, it'll be an interesting week to see where rates come on. Prepayments, we probably have seen those. We would rather not have, because they talk about make-hold provisions, but they're seldom make-hold or partial. Those have really dissipated, so that's helpful. We're seeing a very low level of prepayment. You always have a little bit, but we're seeing a low-level prepayment. I think that's a good thing. Scale will continue to be a positive thing. The interesting thing is that, you know, the investment opportunities remain, but you really have to look at everything on a capital-adjusted basis. And that, I think, is a constant. I mean, everything. It seems like there's an awful lot of wins around that as well. So with that, let me just invite Lina into this piece.

Yeah, I know, Kona, you covered it really well. Well, you know, we've made a lot of progress on the investment portfolio to add margin the last three years. I would say some of it was taken back by the prepayments that Conor referred to because those were spreading CLOs that we had acquired back when spreads were pretty high in 2018 specifically. And so as those paid off, we did earn quite a bit of prepayment income, but those have slowed down. So now our efforts to add margin in the portfolio should be more pronounced going forward.

Kind of. So one of the other things you've referenced is, you know, the focus on ROE as well. And I think, you know, things have maybe evolved, too, since last we had this investor day. So I appreciate that maybe ROA is not the only way to look at it, right? It's ROE, and you're talking about these fee-based businesses. So are there levers to ROE that go beyond just what we're seeing in the ROA? And what are those?

Well, I think a lot of it will shift to being more capital-like, more fee-based, is the reinsurance opportunity. So at this stage, we reinsure about 90% of the MIGAs and about 50% of the FIAs. Now, within the FIA space, roughly we do about as much income as accumulation. On the income side, we have very noteworthy reinsurance partners. We just added a large one in July. On the accumulation side, we have a sidecar, well, it's about a year old now, a sidecar with Blackstone. So those, I think, are real expansion opportunities for us as well. So it's relatively new that we've gotten to this, call it, 50% level. There's no limitation. I think there's every likelihood we will reinsure more. It's a nice diversifier to Blackstone. So the Blackstone IMA applies to the retained assets, but the reinsured assets, back to the point of being the only one of the top 10 FIA riders that isn't owned by their own asset management firm, the others, there are a lot of companies who want to reinsure that business with us for their own reasons, and that works very well. So the beauty about this is when you ride and retain business, I think everybody probably knows this, you've got a pretty high capital charge on the investment side, an annual charge on the capital side, a one-time charge on the insurance side. When you're reinsuring it, you're getting the capital charge refunded, so you just have the insurance charge for the first year. So after year one, you have an income stream, the fees from the reinsurance, with no capital against it. So that's a great piece of RLE expansion. So an ROE, just to frame it for folks who are at about 11 to 12 right now with a target of 13 to 14, that we are very focused on, and we should be able to continue to grow that. So that's a big part of it. And then just to kind of round that out, we don't reinsure the PRT business, for example, and we're up to almost at $9 billion in assets there. We don't reinsure the life business, nor indeed the RILA, but it isn't big enough. But there are lots of people in the industry who are exploring RILA and PRT reinsurance as well. So we'll watch that kind of interestingly and see what might come of that.

Got it. Okay. That's all very helpful. I'm going to jump around a little bit. I'm going to come back to some of the growth items and questions on the products. But I wanted to go to Lena and ask on private credit. There's a ton of investor focus on this still, as you can imagine. Can you talk just about the importance of it and the new money that you're putting to work and why it's an attractive asset class for F&G?

Yeah, absolutely. So just to set the stage, private credit to us is anything that is illiquid, but for the purpose of this discussion, I'll just focus on middle market lending and asset-backed lending. And within those buckets, you know, we think about it in three categories. The first one being, you know, sort of asset classes that have insurance companies have been doing for a long time, like middle market lending. They've been on insurance balance sheets for a long time. And then the middle bucket is asset classes that have been on institutional balance sheets for a long time. So, for example, the banking channel, but are new to insurance balance sheets. So, like, a lot of the collateral that we invest in through asset-backed lending is new to insurance balance sheets. And then there's a third bucket, which is just new, right? Like, I mean, it's not being invested in before, things like buy now, pay later loans. And the reason I break it out this way is that we invest in the first and second bucket, but we stay away from the last bucket because for the first two buckets, there is real observable history and data that you can look at and see how those assets have performed during downturns, and you can see what the downside risk is and what you would want to get paid for that. In the third bucket, you don't get to do that, so we stay away from it. So just want to make that distinction. And then we find it very attractive. So when you diversify your book between public and private assets, you're by design diversifying across issues, and so you're taking less idiosyncratic risk. Now, yes, there is more complexity with some of these private assets because they are structured, but as long as you have the infrastructure to understand that complexity and price it, which we do with our asset manager, Blackstone, they manage over a trillion dollars of assets, and that entire ecosystem is built to tackle this complexity, understand it, take advantage of it. and earn a premium as a result of it. So both we like the complexity premium. We like the illiquidity premium. We do a lot of analysis on the illiquidity side to make sure that even in a stress scenario, we have ample liquidity in our public investment grade book to meet our liabilities. And so very comfortable with the illiquidity risk we're taking and, you know, like to earn the premium over there. So it's important to our book. And, you know, with Blackstone as our partner, we do it in a very sensible way and a conservative way.

I mean, if I may, some of these, these are not small companies.

I think that's important. That's a good point, Connor. The first quarter earnings disclosures, you know, we have a quarterly investor presentation that we also put out. And with the first quarter one, we added some slides on private credit, basically middle-market lending and asset-backed funding, and added more disclosures to provide more transparency and more granularity as to what that portfolio is. So if you haven't looked at it, look at it. At DeConnor's point, within the middle-market lending book, which is what most people are concerned about, the vast majority of it is investment grade at 91%. There's only half a billion dollars of it, which is below investment grade. Our experience so far has been really good. We've had more upgrades, pretty much zero downgrades. Non-accruals are very minimal. And these are large companies that we are lending to, so with EBITDA around $200 million plus. So very happy with performance there.

Great. Before we leave investments, I did want to ask about just the regulatory environment. Are there any things we should, you know, have top of mind? And I'm just getting the question a lot because of some of the headlines about basketball teams getting sold and so forth. So maybe if you could just make a quick comment on the regulatory environment, how you see that unfolding.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you really asked two questions. The regulatory environment is different from the basketball environment. But, yeah, on the regulatory front, there have been some changes, increased capital charges on CLOs, which we put out a disclosure that the impact to us is going to be approximately 10 points of RBC. And with more management actions, you know, we hope to drive it down even more, but very manageable, even with the 10 points. And there are more sort of initiatives underway, like they're looking at residential mortgage loans and RSAT assets, et cetera. But it doesn't impact us as much on the RSAT side because it's only – they're looking at it, from what I understand, only where you're hedging credit spread risk. We don't do that. We are more doing it for interest rate risk. So nothing over there. And then on the RML side, they are looking at RMLs that are more commercial in nature, so similar to CMLs, and that could increase capital charges on the margin for residential mortgage loans. We do have a meaningful allocation there, but it's going to be minor because CMLs are also pretty attractive on a capital-adjusted basis, and with RMLs using more than CMLs, they are still attractive on a capital-adjusted basis. So on the margin, asset allocation will change. As the capital-adjusted yields change, the optimizer picks assets differently, but not meaningful or not something we are concerned about. And then on the basketball environment, I guess you're referring to the whole guggenheim mark walter uh i mean not to name names but i just want to clarify that we don't have any asset manager ownership so blackstone does not own any part of fng so there is zero affiliation over there that is robust governance uh around our asset management the fng investment team and risk team set the strategy as well as the risk limits within which Blackstone manager manages the assets, there is a lot of oversight and full transparency around the asset management.

And I just want to go back for a second. The CLA is an interesting example, right? So why did we have CLA's in our portfolio? It's a really good asset class as an alternative to cash. And when the changes came during the year, they were lower for anything above BBB. And starting at BBB and below it got higher, we have a lot of BBB. So that's where the 10 basis points came from. But it made a lot of sense for us. It was a very good asset class for us. So you're also dealing with great investments. They're fully liquid. There are lots of folks within and external from the insurance space. The idea of trading out of them and taking a loss doesn't make a lot of sense because you've used them to price your book, et cetera. So we'll navigate that. Ten points doesn't really matter to us. But it was an intentional cost. And some of it, when the NAFC sit down with the Academy of Actuaries and work things like that, generally good things happen. Some overspill from that that maybe was maybe a little, I don't know, just when the actuaries are involved, I'm looking at Mike to my left, that generally I'm like, hey, this will be a good thing. But Min is right. I mean, at every stage, even heading into next year's planning, you're looking at a capital adjusted and try to anticipate where the shifts will be a little bit because competitiveness and pricing is tight. And, you know, investing, it's no longer on – and we're limited as to where you can have certain asset classes, obviously, like everybody would be. But when there's a higher capital charge associated, you really have to take that into consideration as well.

Jumping around a bit here, but I wanted to touch on peak altitude. I know you guys are exploring, you know, different alternatives for that business potentially. can you take us through what that could look like and how do you approach maximizing short-term value in this? Okay, let's refer a bit to that.

So really quickly, Peak Altitude is, over the last number of years, we've invested in some of our independent distribution partners, or we now refer to as own distribution. We've invested about 700 million in four entities. We own them at different levels of ownership. We've got a 100, a 70, a 49, and a 40. But for the 49 and 40, a clear path to majority. and it generates about $80 million to $85 million of EBITDA. So we'd love that business. And what we would like to do ideally, and we'll see how this plays out, but I think the example we've cited is having a partner who would invest alongside us. We would rather own half as much of an entity, twice as big, if you will, just to be simplistic. It has no debt of its own. So someone who would be able to continue to invest alongside us, take on some debt perhaps if they wanted to do that. Those entities, the opportunity to bring them to larger ownership, and they themselves are rolling up entities underneath. So it's not about peak going from four to five to six to seven. It's really those four continuing to grow. There are other structures. We have distribution partners who would buy the business, I think, tomorrow, but we would like to continue to share in the upside, hence that sort of idealistic world of 51-49 has some advantages for Mike on the accounting side because we sell about 30% of our life business and 10% of our annuity business through those entities. So some of that gets consolidated away. 49% would cure that. But we're right in the middle of it. If other structures come along that make more economic sense, we'll weigh that up, which is sort of important, and you know this as well as I do. From a valuation perspective, I can sit here and tell you all the reasons we're a great company, but I think from a stock perspective, I think, well, perhaps the whole industry is perhaps underperforming, but I've certainly put us square in that category as well. So, you know, roughly speaking, we're trading at about $3 billion. We have a book value of $6-ish billion, and we can debate elements of it. But I think, similarly, from our perspective, certainly, if we look at our segments and apply the average multiples that others in the industry would have, I think we would have a number back in that six range. If we look at our internal cash flow testing and the present value of the distributable earnings across the blocks of business, we'd get to the same, call it $6 billion type number. So part of it is just how do we unlock and bring a tangibility to some of that valuation. And peak is part of it. It's logical to think that if we turn some of that into cash, it's hard to trade cash at $0.50 on the dollar. Maybe not impossible. We'll find out. But that seems to be a good step for us.

I wanted to circle back on sales. FIAs is a place where you guys sound pretty optimistic on the market. Can you talk a bit about that and some of the things you're doing from a distribution standpoint to drive sales?

We've had a good start to the year, and that momentum is continuing. So we feel, I think it's important, pricing has remained, I think, fairly rational. I'm slightly careful. My crystal ball here is a couple of months, right? I've got a pretty good sense of the next couple of months. It's hard for me to go much beyond that. But it is, you know, we talk about having core retail products. It's probably the most core because it drives a big part of our stuff. So we continue to feel very good there. But as I mentioned earlier at the outset, it's probably a little tighter in the couple of dozen financial institutions and broker-dealer spaces that we play in. So that feels like it will hold up. I think we touched on some of it. IUL feels like it will as well. PRT remains to be seen. I think the level of – so Ryla remains very robust for everybody. I'm sure the big players are jockeying for their own individual relative share. And then we'll see some of the noise in the industry at the moment, if I can go there carefully, we'll probably create some opportunities. Some folks will be able to sell less, some will pick up on that. I'm not sure it'll move it down that notably over the long term. Back to my comment at the beginning about how top-ten riders write about 70% of this business on average over a longer period anyway. So, yeah, we feel really good. We feel we're in a good capital position for it. We'd like the alternative portfolio to do a little better, I'll be honest. So, I mean, that would give us even more capital flexibility, but we'll get there. We have an expectation we'll get there. Did I answer?

Yeah, no, you did. Maybe I want to follow up just on the point you mentioned on, you know, disruption in the market. And, you know, obviously there's a big player being acquired. There's a couple of companies that are merging. So it's not any one specifically even that you've got to comment on, but there's things moving around. I mean, is that, are you seeing meaningful opportunities? Are there opportunities to get shelf space for things like that? People have to divert that.

So specifically for us, the one being required, I think most of us probably sit here and we hope it's dead. Yeah, we're all rooting for that. Interestingly, the merger, the Cobra Jacker merger, doesn't really impact us too much. Even though we're an even bigger player in the space, we don't actually trip over each other too much. So I don't see that as being very meaningful for us. I think, yeah, I mean, if a, well, I'll be effective that a Delaware Life may lose a couple of distribution partners. A couple have said that they are pausing, whether it's concerns around Delaware Life or the regulatory or the waiting agency perspective on it. Sure, in the near term, might that make a little bit of a difference? Yeah, but I think we can write – honestly, for us, it's a risk-adjusted capital balance. We can write a – I wouldn't suggest we can write as much IUL or FIA as we want, but at margins we like, we can write plenty. And I don't feel restrained or limited there. And part of that, too, is we're not in that very wealthy segment of the population. There's a lot of need in middle America and multicultural America for IUL and FIA. And that's why RYLA is good for us as well. We're not competing with the big players. We're selling RYLA to people who are buying their first annuity product. That's the beauty of it. It's a great product for that. So we feel pretty partially or quite notably insulated from a lot of that, which is helpful.

Helpful. Look, I want to come back to capital management. I know you commented a little bit about it already. You've potentially got flexibility coming in from peak. You mentioned the valuation where it's sitting and makes it fairly attractive. You've also been shifting towards more flow reinsurance and reinsurance in general. So all of that could allow you to ramp it up if you wanted, is my guess. But what does that look like? How do you decide on the trade-offs between taking advantage of cheap stock versus the long-term growth strategy and so forth? I'll separate a little bit, and I'll go deeper into anything that's helpful for you.

So in terms of what I would describe as the daily capital management, right? So the in-force produces a lot of capital, which for the most part we're using to service debt, I pay what is a very healthy dividend relative to the stock price and then continue to write about $12 to $13 billion of business a year. Now, we did buybacks to some extent this year, and that's always a tool available to us. And I think I am both optimistic and pessimistic in capital planning, optimistic because of how everything's progressing. I have to be slightly careful of the old portfolio yielding, call it 7% instead of 12% on $4 billion. That's a couple hundred billion a year, and we're three and a half years into subdued alt return. So we're going to have to have a little bit of a lens as to if that continues. So obviously the alt portfolio, and our longer-term return has been closer to 10%. We have expectations that that will come through, but that's a lot of capital, or we're waiting for a lot of capital, depending on your perspective on that. I think the piece that gets interesting, though, is there's a lot of capital in the in-force. You know, we've grown from $25 to $55 billion retained, so PEAK is an example of taking what you might, by comparison, argue as a piece of in-force and turning some of that into capital. So those are the tools that have been available to us but that we haven't executed on. So that's part of the, you know, just weighing up what the courses of action are. So we have an awful lot of opportunity that we can avail of. Back to it's hard to, you know, we can trading at $0.50 when it's cash is, you know, lots of leverage there. So we'll see where we go.

All right. Maybe we can leave it with, you know, with your valuation where it is. What do you think is the biggest misconception? Like, what would you urge people to consider about your stock that you think is not being perceived correct?

Well, everybody would have their own views better. I would think that it's a simple book. That was a big part of what attracted me to the company. So this is a book of very simple FIA, IUL, PRT, you know, a million American customers on the insurance side and 150,000 pensioners. It's really simple. There's no legacy VA, ULSG, long-term care disability or anything like that. Like it's the – for a company of our size, and we type, you know, gross AUM growth, like we don't have the outflows that – I mean, almost every major company has, you know, either an underappreciated business or a damaged business, right? We could all argue this, right? And we're in the underappreciated economy. There's nothing damaged. So that's part of it. And at the end of the day, the tangible cash that exists within that enforce, I think, is probably the thing that's the most underappreciated. Like, I consider in time how great this, you know, the team or the culture or anything like that. All of that will help us grow very, very well from here. But in terms of the actual value, so, you know, you can talk about this earlier. We've gone from 25 to 55. We could go right back down to 25 and do it all over again. There's nothing to prevent us from doing that. So I think that's where the real opportunities potentially lie. But we'll navigate all of that.

Well, thanks very much for being with us today. Thanks, everybody in the audience.